Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road (2021)

There has been a lot of Brian Wilson’s story that has been told on film, and I have seen a number of them, but this one has such a charming demeanor, and tells his end story so nicely that it is well worth watching. Brian Wilson is a pop genius to be sure, but he did more than write great pop music. He turned pop songs into hymns, soaring chorales, sublimely delicate and jaunty effusions of sweet-souled sound laced with an underlying sadness that celebrates the joyfulness of an emotional life. The movie cuts back and forth between the saga of Wilson and the Beach Boys and a “Carpool Karaoke”-style conversation between Brian, still hale and hanging in there with his tentative, blunted, anxiety-ridden, doggedly sincere approach to everyday experience, and Jason Fine, an editor at Rolling Stone magazine, who met Wilson during the course of doing a feature on him in the mid-’90s. The two began to hang out and became friends, and in “Long Promised Road” they cruise around L.A., talking and listening to Brian’s music and stopping at key locales: Paradise Cove, the home of “Surfin’ Safari”; the site of Wilson’s now-demolished childhood home in Hawthorne; the houses he lived in during the ’60s and ’70s; the home of his late brother Carl; and the Beverly Glen Deli, where the two chat over Cobb salads and ice-cream sundaes. In the end, I felt a little bit better about Brian Wilson’s end game, and how the story all came out.